When this painting was exhibited in the Salon of 1877, it was seen as a document of contemporary Parisian life. Béraud depicts a view of the rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré, which had recently become a fashionable shopping street. The church was designed in the eighteenth century by the architect J.F. Chalgrin.

Henry Houssaye. L'Art français depuis dix ans. Paris, 1882, pp. 153, 156, as "La Sortie de Saint-Philippe-du-Roule"; criticizes it for various inaccuracies including the size and color of the street; comments that without more lively colors, this genre of painting has no more artistic value than a sketch from "Illustration".

Richard Shiff. Cézanne and the End of Impressionism. Chicago, 1984, pp. 8, 203–4, 298 n. 17, figs. 2 and 44, remarks that this picture does "share one very important quality with other 'impressionist' works: except for the stagelike emptiness of its foreground, it lacks the more obvious compositional devices and seems instead to capture the life of a moment as if without preconception or arrangement".